Judith
by tarajcl
Summary: She wants to break his neck in two places. Tang Shen fic, set in the original Mirage comics.


Warnings: Rape, death, will make no sense if you don't know Mirage canon. This one's dark.

Disclaimer: I do not lay claim to any of the characters contained herein, regardless of what horrible things I may do to them.

**judith**

She often wishes Yoshi had thought to teach her, too.

Then she realises that's foolish; the only people she ever needs to fight are the ones that have no interest in fighting her.

Nagi's hair smells of peaches, as always, and his breath smells of alcohol, as has become frequent. She probably should have noticed that.

His neck, stretched out across her shoulder with his face buried in her hair, is just an inch too far away for her to bite. Which wouldn't be honourable, and for which Yoshi would have likely scolded one of his own pupils, but she can't help but think about her mother.

Her mother had moved around like a heavy thundercloud, and washed customer's dishes that looked small in her hands, and had turned to Shen one day with a dark and narrow look.

"Don't bite boys, girl. You'll never get a husband like that. Tch. I should have birthed you with fangs; you could a piranha fish in one of those unholy jungles."

Young Shen, with big apologetic eyes and blood on the corner of her mouth, had twisted a dolly in her hands and said sorry to her mother, but never quite got round to apologising to the boy she had bitten.

She had wished then that she did have fangs, though. She's wished it most of her life, and with Nagi bruising her pelvis and his hands around her wrists and his jugular so very, very close, she wishes it now more than ever.

She can't help but grunt in pain, but he doesn't seem to hear her over the sound of his own ragged breaths that are more like snarls than anything else. He really does sound very unhappy, and Shen thinks...Shen doesn't think anything at all, not as her head slams back against the wall for a third time and she loses another pin, but she does wish that Yoshi had taught her too. She wishes it more than fangs, more than anything in the world.

And that is when Prince Charming arrives, and they live happily ever after. He helps her adjust her robe, and she manages to find the pins for her hair somewhere in the spreading puddle of blood.

0

A lifetime later, Tang Shen turned her face to one side again. She wasn't trying to enrage him unnecessarily, but seeing Nagi's gaze from the eyes of his younger brother was disturbing. She hadn't seen them since she'd taken her beloved away across the water to prevent him from lodging a blade between his ribs, but she had found them difficult to forget.

Oroku Saki pressed the blades on his right arm against her sleeve; that was another dress gone to the dogs, she thought bleakly. There was no rape beyond the penetration of steel, but she somehow could not find it in her to be grateful.

The…the hate in his eyes was also just like Nagi, just like Yoshi when Nagi had died, and just like her father when she'd said that yes, those pills were hers and unless he put them down she was going to keep screaming just as long as she could. She rolled her eyes to the pale peach wallpaper. At a point, this became so very tedious. There was a gun in the drawer next to her arm, but the fatal one inch difference thwarted her yet again.

She wanted to break his neck in two places and keep the shattered vertebrae in a box to show to friends.

"May I know why?" she queried as he drew back his arm, with those wicked blades on the end of it. His eyes showed surprise at the question.

"You killed somebody I loved, girl."

The cheek. He was fifteen years younger than she was.

"You have a dreadful taste in men," she replied without blinking. There was one that would have turned mother red.

"For what it's worth,_ stupid_ girl, I am _sorry _you had to get involved in all this."

There was an awful lot of sarcasm there, and a little bit of truth.

"What do the Americans say? 'Right back at you', boy."

Steel hit lace, hit flesh, hit bone and he left footprints in her blood on the way out.

end.

(The Judith the title is making reference to would be the one who beheaded Holofernes. Given that Tang Shen did indirectly lead to Saki's beheading, it seemed appropriate.)


End file.
